How Do You Say ‘Billionaire’ in Esperanto?

For a small group of linguists, scholars and dreamers who have become accustomed to having their invitations overlooked, it was no small thing when the billionaire George Soros walked into the room to celebrate with them, Alison Leigh Cowan of The New York Times reports.

Yet there he was Wednesday night at their symposium in Manhattan, doling out savory morsels about the object of their fancy: Esperanto, a century-old language fashioned in the almost evangelical belief that giving the world a common, easy-to-learn second language would reduce conflict.

Mr. Soros recounted what it was like growing up in Budapest in the 1930s and ’40s in a home where Esperanto was spoken, making him one of the few native speakers in the room, if not the planet. “This story was very much part of my childhood,” he said.

His father picked up Esperanto in his 20s and helped start “Literatura Mondo,” a literary journal that published works in Esperanto, in Budapest. Poets and other practitioners of the new language frequented his house, and when the 17-year-old George Soros left Budapest to seek his fortune in England in 1947, he said, “one of the first things I did was seek out the Esperanto Society in London” as a friendly refuge.

“It was a very useful language,” Mr. Soros said, “because wherever you went, you found someone to speak with.”